Stuttering

Stuttering is a speech disorder marked by disruptions in the normal flow of speech. These disruptions called disfluencies, often include:

• Repetitions (of sounds, syllables, words and/or sentences)
• Prolongation of speech sounds, syllables or words (“baaanana”)
• Use of fillers (“um”, “like”)
• Blocks (difficulty initiating sound)

Stuttering may be accompanied by secondary physical behaviors that he call synkinesis including eye blinks, nasal flaring, tremors of the lips and/or jaw and tension in the head, neck, shoulders, hands and overall body.

A person with stuttering might also try to hide disfluencies by avoiding words, changing words by others, pretending to “forget” what they wanted to say, avoiding talking situations or choosing not to speak. Stuttering generally begins in childhood (between 2 ½ and 4 years of age), and genetics play a role in this disorder.

While young children often demonstrate little or no awareness of their disfluencies, older children become increasingly aware of their stuttering and people’s reactions to it. This is why, we often refer the patients to psychologists for support.

A stuttering evaluation is performed by a speech and language pathologist.

It involves evaluating the types of disfluencies a person has in a variety of situations (e.g. spontaneous speech sample, oral reading), assessment of oral-motor and language skills (if necessary) and determining the client’s attitude towards stuttering and its impact on his or her daily life. This information is then analyzed to determine the presence or absence of a fluency disorder and its severity.